Melissesages

Health update: I am about 85% recovered from yesterday’s flu disaster. It was about 90, but I had to drop the number after lunch made me feel worse instead of better. Morning sickness and the flu have so much in common, I forget that I’m not really operating by the same rules I’ve gotten used to.

This morning something bad occurred to me: I am way, WAY behind in preparing for grad school applications. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, I’m applying to UW Milwaukee to get my Masters in English – Creative Writing. I’m incredibly psyched to go, but I’ve only recently remembered just how much college applications suck. There’s so much to do, including taking the GRE, which I have not yet signed up for (oops). I’ve asked the relevant people for my letters of recommendation – yay – and thanks to my personal stuff I should be set for having a writing sample. But there’s still a ton, including getting my transcripts from USC (annoying) and writing a bunch of personal statement-type stuff.

It all reminds me quite a bit of applying for jobs – remember how obnoxious that is, just in writing a cover letter, updating your resume, and finding some dependable references? Okay, now multiply that by ten and add on a daunting 3-hour standardized test, and you’ve got grad school applications…to ONE school. God forbid I apply to backups.

On the “looking ahead” front, I’m also beginning to worry about maternity leave – not whether or not I’ll get it (I can have up to six weeks) but how exactly Tyler and I are going to pay for it. Even if I use up a week of vacation time, that’s five weeks in which I’m getting no paycheck. Add on the two or so weeks Tyler will probably take for paternity leave, and we have a serious cash flow problem. How on earth are we supposed to make it without a total seven weeks of pay, especially considering when we go back we’ll have to pay for day care? What do people do here?

This is one of those situations in which it sucks to be a young mom (unless you’re Jessica Alba, who’s probably covered financially). There’s a million parenting and pregnancy books, magazines, and websites out there, but they’re all written for established, successful mommies, many of whom can stay home with the kids. And everybody tells me about how I have the right to take this leave to get to know my infant, but nobody has any advice as to how I afford that. Tyler and I talked about one of us trying to get a seasonal retail job, but it’s just not very feasible – both of our work schedules are all over the place, changing from week to week, not to mention that I’m increasingly pregnant and tired a lot as it is. We’ve also got stuff coming up on the weekends – a trip to see my grandparents in IL for their anniversary, Thanksgiving, etc – and we’re starting baby classes and prenatal yoga (for me) in November and December. I make a few extra dollars here and there with babysitting, but that’s dried up for the most part, and I can’t really blame my families – who wants a chubby pregnant woman to look after their older, physically active kids, when she can’t even pick any of them up?

So what am I supposed to do? Take out a maternity leave loan? Go back to work after only a week with my kid? Have a bake sale? I have no idea. The only good thing is, I’ve got a little time to figure it out. Hopefully I’ll come up with a genius plan. I’m just irritated that this isn’t something anyone else seems to be bothered by.

In related news, flu-achiness aside, I’ve begun to notice my mobility deteriorating. First I noticed I could no longer be sitting and lean forward to rest my elbows on my knees (once you can no longer do something like that, you realize you used to do it ALL THE TIME). Then I started having a hard time getting up off the floor if I sit down on it, and if I twist in certain ways, my abdomen screams in pain – it’s like, the sides of my pregnancy bump have muscles, and I pull them.

I’m not really complaining too much (honestly, at this point it’s kind of a novelty – how weird is it that I can’t get up off the floor?) though I’m sure in another two months it will be incredibly frustrating. But in another way, decreased flexibility makes me kind of happy, because it means I’m getting closer and closer to my due date, which I’m really ready for already. People keep saying two things to me: “Enjoy your pregnancy” and “It’ll go really fast.” It’s my experience that these people are idiots. First, for me, being pregnant sucks. I hate it. And second, no, it won’t go fast, and if it does, it won’t be fast enough (see previous sentence). I think I’m gonna smack the next person who says that to me. It’ll help pass the time.

It’s cold. The high for today, when I woke up this morning, was 39 degrees, which is preposterously chilly, even for Wisconsin. Although I do remember a Halloween or two from my childhood that had snow, I’m just not READY for this kind of cold this early in the year. I do not feel prepared. This morning I had to dig a stocking cap out of the back of the closet, and the one I found was not exactly the world’s nicest. I have no idea where my gloves, scarves, or other hats are. Some of that is due to moving into the new house last March, but I just never thought I’d be worrying about this stuff so soon. What happened to fall? I’m supposed to have more time!

Tyler is excited about winter (freak) because it makes his dog happy. Tucker is a snow dog, a Norwegian Elkhound, and he’s basically seasonally bipolar. During the spring, summer, and most of the fall, Tucker is just sort of lazy, dumb, and slow. He has no real purpose or function except to lay around, beg for food, and beg for petting. This tends to annoy me because a) I am obviously used to a much more active dog, b) constantly being begged at is obnoxious, and c) I tend to trip over Tucker a lot, due to his general practice of following me around looking for treats. Being pregnant and having a new center of gravity have not made this endearing to me.

In the winter, though, Tucker undergoes a complete personality change, which is sort of hilarious. He’s still pretty dumb, but imagine the laziest dog in the world. Now imagine him turning frolicsome. That’s right – he frolics. Tucker loves snow and cold so much, he goes outside and dances around in it, doggy-style. It’s pretty cute and definitely funny, but as I’ve told Tyler repeatedly, not a good enough reason to wish for winter.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve placed my first wedding picture on the website, which you can access by going to melissaolson.net and clicking on Photos. My Talented and Amazing webmaster, Kurt, has added a new photo-viewing system that I am just learning to use, so check back tonight or tomorrow as I add more pictures. I’ll also be putting up a shot of Tyler and I carving our pumpkins last week – Tyler hadn’t done it since he was like 10, so he had to relearn a few things (“I take the gooey stuff out with my hands?”) but did a great job anyway. I like my pumpkin, too. But when we tried to carve the little baby-size pumpkin, we ran into problems: for some reason, the small pumpkin had the World’s Thickest Pumpkin Skin. I couldn’t cut into it at ALL. Finally, Tyler managed to saw off the top of the pumpkin, theoretically to get inside and carve the thing, only to discover that yep, the sides of the pumpkin were more than two inches thick. Unless you have a machete (which, sadly, we don’t) the baby pumpkin’s exterior is indestructible, which was kind of funny. We ended up drawing a face on there and putting it outside with the rest of the pumpkins, but with the top clearly cut off and replaced, it kind of looks like we gave it a lobotomy. Whoops.

In other news, I had a busy, great weekend: This was the Madison Writers’ Institute’s “Weekend With Your Novel,” a sort of mini-convention where writers like me attend short seminars for a day or two on different aspects of fiction writing. I love, LOVE doing these things, because it always gets me motivated to work on my book – during the last convention, for example, I wrote about sixteen novel pages that weekend alone. This time I’ve probably added about eight. But the point isn’t just to write, it’s to be inspired, and a convention high stays with me for weeks afterwards. It’s a great kick in the butt to move forward.

I was also quite the social butterfly this weekend, if I do say so myself. Tyler and I attended a cocktail party on Friday night (Okay, we may have left after 45 minutes, but we didn’t know many people there and it still counts). I had the writing convention all day Saturday, and Saturday evening we did dinner and a movie with my Uncle Bill, a Madison alumnus who was in town for the football game. (Uncle Bill is just one of those cool relatives you like having around, and not just because he buys dinner. The guy is fun.) Then on Sunday my friend Pierce Griffin came over for lunch and some Wii time (get it? It’s like “me time” but not). I met Pierce in March at a different writers’ convention, and he’s been my writing friend ever since – I enjoy him because he and I can actually talk serious writing problems and because he has the coolest name ever. He was in town for the same convention I attended, and came to the house to meet Tyler and the dogs (it’s always funny when non-dog people meet our dogs, especially Max. I do a lot of apologizing). We played Super Smash Brothers (I suck so bad, I don’t even know how to hit people) and MarioKart (where I fared much better). I also got to use all my hostess-related wedding gifts, so that was just a bonus. Then last night Tyler and I went out for sushi with his brother and sister-in-law. So I’m feeling very virtuous on the get-out-and-see-people front, and very satisfied about my weekend. It was a great mix of work and play, activities and downtime. Oh, and I ended it all by kicking Tyler’s butt in a Sequence tournament last night.

So that’s what’s going on with me – this a pretty selfish, update on Melissa’s life kind of blog, so thanks for tuning in until the end. As a reward, I leave you with the coolest thing I’ve seen today: video of 881 people in Austin doing the choreographed “Thriller” dance. I love people. Austin is a great town, and you just gotta respect this kind of commitment to oddity.

Last Thursday, in my infinite grace, I slipped while trying to climb up a waterslide for work (long story), and managed to gauge a chunk out of my chin. Whoops. It serves me right for forgetting that my center of gravity has changed. At the time, I obviously knew I’d hurt my chin, but thought I had just scraped it – I was planning to just keep on working until the guy who gave me a band-aid told me I “probably needed a stitch.” Five ugly, spidery stitches later, I look a little bit psychotic and no matter how much I try to remember, I keep accidentally resting my chin in my hands, which is inevitably followed by cursing. Awesome. At least I’ll have a good scar and a story to tell the baby.

Speaking of her, three people have successfully guessed the name of my daughter, and I actually only suspect one of them of cheating, which I figure is a pretty good turnout all around. The best wrong guess I’ve gotten so far is “Lydia Zemato.” I don’t even know what “Zemato” means. If you are one of the people who have successfully guessed, please keep the name to yourself. If I wanted everyone to know, I wouldn’t have posted the name as a jumble. Thank you to everyone who played.

In other news, I had a nice weekend of combined lazing around and working hard on house stuff. My folks were down from Chippewa Falls on Saturday, and they helped a lot with sealing the basement from rain and organizing the kitchen with all the new wedding presents. It was only their second trip since we bought the house – I do wish they could visit more, but I suppose they’ll probably be spending a lot more time down here once the baby is born. They better, anyway – Tyler’s family is very nice, but sometimes a girl just needs her mom and dad.

Now that I know what to look for – or rather, feel for – I can feel the baby kicking all the time. I thought the sensation would be creepy, but it’s too funny – it’s like this little muted “pop, pop” going off in my belly, but below my stomach, which is where we usually have sensations. Unlike stomach feelings, which are often predictable based on whether I’m hungry or what I ate, the baby kicks are completely surprising, which is funny, too. I’ll be just going about my day, kinda having forgotten about my womb occupant, and then suddenly there’s this soft “pop” and it’s like “whoa. That came from INSIDE me.” I’m also beginning to tell the difference between an actual kick – which feels like a clearly defined “pop” – and when she just swims around grazing the walls, which feels like…well, I guess like I swallowed a live goldfish, sort of. It’s very interesting.

This weekend we also started working on the nursery, which we decided a long time ago, way before we knew the baby’s sex, that we’d decorate with puppies. Now that I’ve actually begun to price-compare some wallpaper and things, though, I’m getting a little indignant: all the puppy stuff is in the boy’s section of stores and online stores, and clearly marked by light blue. What, girls can’t like puppies? I’ve long been annoyed about the blue thing (GIRLS CAN LIKE BLUE, TOO), but I was surprised that all the puppy stuff is considered boy territory. Come on, people. First of all, little girls can do or like anything that little boys do (this should not be news), and secondly, puppies are one of the cutest and cuddliest things around – it makes complete sense for even the girliest of girly-girls to adore puppies. We’re doing puppies anyway, and if the girl has lots of blue stuff, good for her. I highly doubt a nursery done in blue tones instead of (ew) pink is going to be psychologically damaging to my newborn. And if she does have a gender identity crisis because I went with blue/puppies, well, I’ll write a book about it and pay for her therapy. Everybody wins.

Last night I had my first dream about the baby. In the dream, I had the baby six weeks early, which didn’t affect its health, and it was a girl. Then a whole bunch of weird things happened (ie me visiting Tracy in LA, but she was now married to Richard Gere only he wasn’t Richard Gere but just playing a wealthy older man that Tracy had essentially married for his money. There was also this big sequence with Tyler and my whole family at KFC, and we all got family meals but Tyler just HAD to get his own thing, etc. Oh, and I was shopping for a coat for the baby. Messed up, right?), but through the rest of the dream I loved my daughter. And I know this sounds weird, but when I woke up I kind of missed her.

This is the first sign of me being excited (though perhaps subconsciously, but in my defense I have a lot on my conscious mind) about having an infant. I’ve wanted kids for awhile now, and I’ve been looking forward to things like showing the kid all my favorite books and movies, teaching it good values, buying him/her their first puppy, and answering long ridiculous questions about whatever nonsense it’s heard at daycare. But all that is the later stuff, when the kid actually develops a personality and the ability to speak. I’ve never been particularly excited about having a baby-baby, because, well, they’re kind of boring. Seriously, they don’t do anything. I consider infants more of a long-term investment than an immediate reward.

Or I did, until this dream. Now, I’m not suggesting that this dream was some sort of a premonition or prophesy that I’m going to have a girl and name it _________ (you didn’t think I was going to give away our girl name that easily, did you?), because I don’t particularly believe in those things. If your dreams were as messed up-weird as mine usually are (honestly, they make “Fantasia” look like a thoughtful, well-structured parable), you wouldn’t, either.

But I am just a touch superstitious (thanks, Mom), and I do believe in psychology to some extent, so I do think that the dream was my mind telling me to “chillax,” as Tyler would unfortunately say, about the baby. Call it hormones, call it maternal instincts, call it nature’s effort to further reproduction, but I woke up from the dream feeling a sense of the baby as, well…my baby. Mine. And I loved it. It was a very…relieving feeling, if that makes any sense.

So, since that was deeply serious and also delved into dream interpretation, I feel compelled to end this blog with something completely non-serious. Yesterday I discovered a hilarious website, Cracked.com, which has like a zillion funny lists along the lines of “The 7 Most Terrifying Corporate Mascots of All-Time,” ” Where Aren’t They Now?: 5 Post-Star Wars Careers Almost as Pathetic as Mark Hamill’s,” and “The 5 Most Kick-Ass Apocalyptic Prophecies.” Though I’ve never been a fan of publications that “over-list,” unable to stop categorizing the entire universe, Cracked.com does it ironically, and with a great deal of intelligence and hilarity. Their list of companies that helped the Nazis and are still around today made me laugh out loud, shake my head in sympathetic disgust, and pass the article on to someone else. Go check it out.

So, last night was about the third night in a row where I thought it would be fun to just not sleep. Okay, obviously, it wasn’t so much a decision on my part as a necessity due to brand-new health problems.

When I was in seventh grade, my mom took me to a specialist to be tested for allergies. I was (happily) not allergic to dogs, or even cats, but I was allergic to two things: a tree called Box Elder, and ragweed. The weird part was, my allergy to ragweed was literally off the charts: the doctor had a little grid, showing the range of just how allergic to something you are, and she had to draw in a new box for me above the margins. That’s how crazy allergic I am to stupid grass.

In the past, when I was in Wisconsin (LA is blissfully almost free of ragweed, it was awesome…), I’ve combated my Mutant Allergies with the most powerful drugs available to man: a heavy-duty eye drop, a nasal inhaler steroid, and Allegra, my personal savior of a pill. THIS year, however, there’s been a little catch to my regimen: i’m pregnant.

I can’t take the Allegra, which is a tragic loss for me, so the doc told me to try over-the-counter Zyrtec instead. She also advised me to skip the inhaler and the eyedrops, which has left me nearly defenseless against the Mutant Allergies. I’ve tried both Zyrtec and Clariton now, and they seem to have all the potency of taking a Flintstones vitamin for the flu. I am a mess, inside and out. My face itches, my eyes run and itch, and I sneeze every 3.5 minutes. (Okay, I didn’t actually sit down and time out my sneezes and average it, but now I think it’s a funny idea and I just might). And, most wonderfully, I’ve gone through about two boxes of Kleenex in the last five days. I pretty much want to lay my head in a big vat of something cold and die. And, of course, I look pretty much exactly how I feel: like a walking plague.

And I stopped sleeping.

This morning I called the doctor and badgered them into caving: they’re giving me back my beloved nasal inhaler and the eyedrops, though I’m stuck with stupid Clariton. These drugs haven’t been proven to be dangerous to the baby, but they’re not exactly prenatal vitamins, either, so I’m a little nervous about going back on them…no, wait, that’s a lie. I’m absolutely freakin’ thrilled to be going back on them. I would have been nervous a week ago when I was sleeping, but the more sleep I miss and the more Kleenex I go through, the less inclined I am to care about anything but regaining the ability to breathe properly. I figure me sleeping and breathing is probably pretty good for the baby, so hopefully it will all even out.

But you know what reallly does make me nervous? Tyler is allergic to ragweed, too. Not quite as badly as I am, but still pretty darn bad. And if allergies are inherited, well, we better just move the kid to Antarctica. It’ll be cold, but the whole family will be able to breathe.